New Anti-Evolution Film Stirs Controversy

NEW YORK — A handful of journalists filed into a small theater at the Park Avenue Screening
Room here last night to see a preview for "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." The 90-minute documentary-style
flick features Ben Stein, a comedian, lawyer, actor and former speechwriter. It
is a movie about the so-called debate between supporters of "intelligent
design" and Charles Darwin's scientific theory of evolution.

Filmmakers
proclaim in press materials that Stein "discovers an elitist scientific
establishment that has traded in its skepticism for dogma" during the
course of the movie through interviews with scientists and anti-evolution
advocates.

Some scientists,
however, are outraged about the conduct of the filmmaker during production and
screening as well as the film's effort to tie Darwin's ideas to Hitler. One prominent
scientist who is in the movie has since called it shoddy and sinister.

Intelligently
designed

Intelligent
design, or ID, holds that life on Earth is so complex that evolutionary theory
can't explain the complexities, so life must have been designed. Scientists see
it as creationism veiled in pseudoscience, an effort with religious backing
designed to generate the appearance of controversy among scientists about
Darwinian evolution where there is none.

ID has made
headlines in recent years in
Kansas, Ohio and Michigan as school boards and courts contested its
teaching in public schools alongside evolution, which is a scientific theory
holding that new species appear via gradual changes in inherited traits and
mutations. In 2005, a federal judge barred a Pennsylvania public school
district from teaching ID in biology class.

The basic principles of neither evolution nor ID are clearly explained in the movie.

"Expelled"
is smattered with gloomy scenes of the Berlin Wall's construction, the
Holocaust and other World War II-era footage, with Stein arguing during the
course of it that a handful of academics have been persecuted for their
beliefs that run counter to the scientific establishment.

Many of the
ID supporters and sympathizers Stein interviews in the movie, however, were let
go, not offered tenure or other career incentives because of expired contracts, improper publishing ethics and other conduct unrelated to their
religious views, according to university and institution spokespeople who
appeared in "Expelled."

Stein
claims he "encountered many more [academics] who didn't want to appear on
film," because of their fear of being persecuted.

But among
the millions of scientists currently working in schools and institutions across
the world, thousands of whom are trained evolutionary biologists, the
overwhelming consensus is that evolution is a well-supported theory backed
by observations in several fields using multiple lines of evidence.

Foul
play?

Scientists
interviewed in "Expelled," namely evolutionary biologists Richard
Dawkins of Oxford University and Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers of the
University of Minnesota and author of the blog "Pharyngula," have
been crying foul since the movie's name was changed last year.

The two
have written on their Web sites and blogs that the original film was called
"Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion" based on
correspondence with Mark Mathis, the movie's associate producer at Rampant
Films. But in late 2007 the movie title was changed to "Expelled" for
marketing reasons, the producers reportedly said.

In a press
release issued by Premise Media, which has also helped finance "The
Passion of the Christ" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" movies,
film producer Walt Ruloff claims the makers avoided distorting interviews.

"The
incredible thing about 'Expelled' is that we don’t resort to manipulating our
interviews for the purpose of achieving the 'shock effect,'" Ruloff said.

But Michael
Schermer, editor of "Skeptic Magazine" and an on-screen interview in
the movie, said Stein and Mathis asked him the same question a dozen times
during his interview for the film to extract an answer they were looking for.

"In
frustration I finally said something like 'Do you have any other questions to
ask me or do you keep asking me this question in hopes that I'll give a
different answer?'" according to a statement by Schermer on
richarddawkins.net.

Questionable
claims

Dawkins,
Myers, Schermer and others are also outraged by the claims in the movie, especially
that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory is partly responsible for Nazism and
the Holocaust.

In the film, after Stein
is told of this purported connection by several ID supporters, who also tell
him that Darwin's ideas of species fitness led to U.S. eugenics programs in the
1920s, Stein stares down a dimly lit statue
of Darwin in London's Natural History Museum.

During a
March 28 telephone press conference for "Expelled," Myers snuck in on
the call and confronted the filmmakers about the issue. "Have you ever
heard of a pogrom?" Myers asked. "Those have been going on for
centuries." (A pogrom is an organized massacre of helpless people.)

On his Web
site, Dawkins wrote that the Darwin-Nazi association is a fallacy.

"The
alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems
like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage," Dawkins said of the series
of scenes in the movie. "Hitler was ignorant and bonkers enough for his
hideous mind to have imbibed some sort of garbled misunderstanding of Darwin but it is hardly Darwin's fault if he did."

Expelled
or uninvited?

During a
March 20 screening of "Expelled" at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, which Myers registered to attend via a public Web site with his family, he
was asked to leave by security while standing in line.

The
security guard said a film producer gave the orders to remove Myers from the
theater.

According
to various news reports, producers accused Myers of being a
"gatecrasher" — someone trying to attend an event uninvited — but he
was registered for the event via the open, online registration
process. Dawkins, who also registered to attend the screening, saw the
documentary without incident along with Myers' family.

"It's
an incredible piece of inept public relations to expel somebody … from a film
about expelling people for their opinions," Dawkins said during a
videotaped discussion with Myers, "a film in which [Myers is] present, and
acknowledged and thanked in the acknowledgements at the end of the film."

The overall
mood of the film, as its makers assert, is satirical and sarcastic — and almost
always at the cost of the scientists backing evolutionary
theory. When Dawkins discusses scientific hypotheses for the seeding of
life on Earth from another planet, for example, the film quickly displays
black-and-white movie clips of flying saucers and aliens.

Dawkins
said in the video on his Web site that he was unimpressed with the artistic
direction of "Expelled."

"I'm
not a professional filmmaker myself but I've had a lot to do with making
documentaries," Dawkins said. "This was a very, very shoddy, poor,
inartistic piece of work."

Dawkins
also noted that images of guillotines, firing squads and other reactionary film
clips that flashed between the words of sources especially garnered his
dislike. "It was worse than just artless, it was also quite
sinister," he said. "It was a bad film in every way."

Dave Mosher

Dave Mosher, currently the online director at Popular Science, writes about everything in the science and technology realm, including NASA's robotic spaceflight programs and wacky physics mysteries. He has written for several news outlets in addition to Live Science and Space.com, including: Wired.com, National Geographic News, Scientific American, Simons Foundation and Discover Magazine. When not crafting science-y sentences, Dave dabbles in photography, bikes New York City streets, wrestles with his dog and runs science experiments with his nieces and nephews.